What factors are likely to lead to citizens opposing European integration? Erik R. Tillman notes that a number of recent studies have attempted to explain opposition to the EU in terms of social identity. Drawing on these studies, he argues that those who oppose the EU are likely to subscribe to a particular ‘authoritarian’ worldview which includes a predisposition towards order and conformity. He finds evidence for this hypothesis in an analysis of survey data, suggesting that simply improving economic growth or enacting democratic reforms will not be enough to reverse negative public opinion about the integration process.

Since the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty two decades ago, proponents of European integration have faced a dilemma of sorts. Increasingly, public support is necessary for further integration as European issues become more salient in national politics and as member-state governments more frequently call referendums on European questions. At the same time, public support for the European Union (EU) has declined, making it more difficult for European elites to convince their electorates to support further integration.

Scholars who study European politics have naturally sought to understand the sources of growing public opposition to the EU. Early research analysed the economic sources of public attitudes: individuals who believe they and/or their national economies benefit from EU membership are more likely to support it. In the past decade, there has been a shift toward research emphasising the role of social identity in shaping EU attitudes. For example, those that identify strongly with their nationality oppose European integration. Similarly, opposition to immigration and hostility towards members of foreign religions also increase opposition to the EU. The findings from this line of research are important and compelling. What is missing is a broader understanding of how these different indicators of social identity—national identity, xenophobia, and EU opposition—are related.

Credit: Waldopics (CC-BY-SA-3.0)

To answer that question, I draw upon a concept from the study of psychology: authoritarianism. The study of authoritarianism dates back to the immediate postwar years and the publication of The Authoritarian Personality. Authoritarianism describes an individual predisposition characterised by a high need for order, presumably as a means of coping with the uncertainty and anxiety of social life. This need for order manifests in several characteristic traits. Authoritarians display a tendency to rely upon established and traditional sources of authority for guidance. They are more likely to submit their own autonomy to the judgements of established authorities, and they are likely to react with discomfort or hostility towards challenges to those authority figures. They also display a tendency to view the world in binary terms (right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, etc).

Crucially, this pattern of thinking extends to the social world: authoritarians are more likely draw sharp distinctions between members of in-groups, with which they identify closely, and out-groups, and they strive to maintain cohesion within their social groups. By contrast, non-authoritarians (i.e., those who do not display authoritarian traits) display a greater concern for maintaining individual autonomy, along with more willingness to tolerate ambiguity and to accept challenges to traditional sources of authority.

Drawing on this concept allows us to understand the relationship between social identity and EU attitudes described above. Authoritarianism shapes an individual worldview that promotes strong in-group attachment, adherence to traditional values and sources of authority, and hostility towards threats to that traditional authority or in-group cohesion. In the European context, authoritarians should be more likely to identify strongly with their national community and to express hostility to out-groups such as immigrants or members of foreign religions who might undermine social cohesion. The translation of this worldview into actual social and political attitudes depends on the external environment. To generate opposition, there must be a threat. The early years of European integration posed no particular threat to social cohesion or state sovereignty, but the EU increasingly does in the post-Maastricht era. European integration constitutes a threat to the social cohesion of the national community by promoting intra-EU migration (and EU enlargement has increased both the number of potential migrants as well as their diversity). The EU also erodes state sovereignty as power is transferred to supranational institutions, which authoritarians may view as a threat to the legitimate political order. Symbols of European integration, especially the common currency, reinforce this perceived threat. As a result, authoritarians should be likely to oppose European integration.

In a recent study, I find evidence in support of these claims. Opposition to European integration derives from the same underlying authoritarian predisposition that generates hostility towards immigrants and foreign religions. This result suggests that opposition to the EU is rooted in a broader authoritarian ‘worldview’ that also includes higher levels of nationalism and hostility to social or religious ‘outsiders’. This finding also suggests that one cause of the shift in public opinion during the past two decades from a “permissive consensus” to a “constraining dissensus” was the result of increasing opposition by authoritarians.

What does the finding that authoritarians oppose European integration mean for the future of European integration? Authoritarians constitute a bloc of Europeans who are unlikely to support European integration in the near future. If, indeed, public support is important to the future of integration, then European leaders will need to find enough support from other citizens to overcome the opposition of authoritarians. Economic growth or improved EU-level democracy will not be enough; nor will improved information about the EU or its policies.

Given the growing importance of issues such as European integration, immigration, and globalisation, political divisions between authoritarian and non-authoritarian voters and parties may become more salient. Authoritarians are likely to see each of these as a potential threat, and they will be receptive to elite messages to defend the nation-state. The end result could well be a realignment of national party politics, which Hetherington & Weiler argue has occurred in the United States. Because this authoritarian/non-authoritarian divide reflects a worldview rather than a divisible political issue, such a realignment may have negative repercussions for compromise and governability in national political systems.

Erik R. Tillman – DePaul University
Erik R. Tillman is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at DePaul University. His current research examines the sources of EU attitudes and their effects on national electoral politics. He tweets @ertillman

12 Comments

Yet another article on this blog defaming Eurosceptics whilst hiding its evidence in an academic journal behind a paywall. Why do the opponents of Euroscepticism get a university funded in part by my taxes to push their agenda and defame their opponents, but the Eurosceptics don’t? It’s not appropriate for the LSE to have a dog in this fight, and particularly not for it to suffer the use of closed-access journals as a force-multiplier for the Europhile side: the academics get to read the evidence, at the expense of the taxpayer, while the independent scholar can’t review it.

To address the actual point: it’s irrelevant to the question “are some Eurosceptics correct about the EU?” for the Eurosceptics to be authoritarians. It’s ad hominem. What this article seems instead to be about is trying to divide Eurosceptics on authoritarian/libertarian lines.

The author offers us no valid conclusions about the direction of causality between the various traits he mentions (strength of feeling in national identity, authoritarianism, hostility to foreigners and other religions). What we don’t get is the proportion of authoritarians who support the EU, only that Eurosceptics seem to be authoritarians, in some unstated proportion. Where is the figure on how many libertarians oppose the EU? (I have never met a Europhile libertarian, do they exist?).

Even if the sources were available, I’d question the statistical rigour of what the author is impliedly concluding (to the extent that “rigour” is even relevant when trying to base upon psychology an argument about constitutional law, economics and politics)

“Yet another article on this blog defaming Eurosceptics whilst hiding its evidence in an academic journal behind a paywall.”

That’s a pretty odd line of argument. The entire purpose of an academic blog is to bring research out from behind paywalls and make it available to a general audience. Your implication here seems to be that it would be better for all of the article to be hidden behind a paywall than to have an incomplete summary of it in the public domain.

I don’t particularly agree with this piece, but it seems pretty obvious it’s an attempt to draw together the “typical traits” of a Eurosceptic – in short to get an understanding of why Eurosceptics oppose the EU. Basic political science in other words, and no different to attempts to work out why people vote Labour, why they vote Tory, and why they don’t vote at all. The authoritarian model has been used in the US context and this is an (in my opinion flawed) attempt to transfer it to the European context.

As usual however we seem to resort to baseless claims of systematic bias (complete with affronts to taxpayers) rather than simply criticising the argument.

“As usual however we seem to resort to baseless claims of systematic bias (complete with affronts to taxpayers) rather than simply criticising the argument.” … nonsense. I very obviously criticised the argument as well as made the claim to which you refer. Read the whole comment.

You say “the whole purpose of [….]”, without saying whether the supposed “purpose” of something is relevant. I might think the purpose of something is different from what you think it is. Let’s stick to the consequences, which we can agree about, rather than unverifiable claims about “purposes”.

Prof Tillman could easily have at least cited the actual numbers, the actual data, rather than asserting that they exist. It *is* worse for the public debate to be influenced by knowledge which isn’t accessible to all – everyone should have an equal chance to participate. I’d rather that public debate were *not* corrupted by these kinds of assertions.

“I might think the purpose of something is different from what you think it is. Let’s stick to the consequences, which we can agree about, rather than unverifiable claims about “purposes”.”

If you want to go off into the realms of epistemological absurdity and argue that it’s impossible to ever know the real purpose of anything then great… in the real world there are countless sites like this one being set up as a way to make academic research more accessible. At present you’re essentially using the existence of paywalls to criticise a format that was set up explicitly to get around the problem of paywalls – which is a touch unfair at best.

Of course for all the semantic gibberish in the quote above, you *do* actually want to talk about “purposes”. Indeed your objection to the piece is largely framed around the purpose of the academic (and this site). You object to the article on the basis that it’s an “ad hominem” attack on Eurosceptics, rather than for the specifics of its conclusions. You also all but accuse him of purposefully “hiding evidence” behind a paywall as a way to shield his argument from criticism – something that makes very little sense at the best of times given the journal piece is still widely available, paywall or not.

Worse, you object to the mere existence of the article on the grounds that it supposedly exemplifies bias on the part of the LSE (i.e. the purpose of it is to spread Europhile propaganda). In your own words, the LSE is attempting “to push their agenda and defame their opponents”.

In no way is any of this consistent with your supposed desire to only talk about “consequences”. The only consequence I can see is that we have a summary of some (but not all) of the material contained in a journal article that otherwise wouldn’t be in the public domain. The idea that an article like this “corrupts the debate” simply because it relies on research that’s published behind a paywall is complete nonsense. About the worst you can accuse the author of in that regard is laziness for not offering a more extensive outline of his findings.

Mr Wilburton is pretending the third paragraph in my original comment doesn’t exist. It’s not worth arguing this point anymore. He mischaracterises a lot of other things I say too.

I don’t want to live in a world where a single tweet can derail an election, but that’s the world we live in, just ask Sean Gallagher and whoever faked the tweet which terminated his candidacy.

The spin doctors know perfectly well that there’s a difference between a claim on a weblog that anyone can verify at a single click, and a claim on a weblog which takes you to a paywall, however easy it might be to get a copy of the relevant literature. There’s a whole SEO industry devoted to gaming people’s attention spans and calculating how many clicks make them move on.

I think Professor Tillman is misrepresenting his sources.
If you think otherwise, post them here. But don’t pretend that I hadn’t also addressed the substantive point, which is that it’s unlikely they can support his conclusions anyway.

A EU future matter is not a case of authoritarianism or of any of political orders in the first place but that of its legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. The most recent legitimacy template, a nation of equal citizens, is build within the national sovereignty narrative. A political order, either the Left or Right wing, presents the matter or rather, a means of the realization of the template, which has been already accepted by the members as the general narrative of interaction. The non-authoritarians versus authoritarians division thus, may reflect different political cultures and mentalities and could become a matter of discussion and scientific classification, yet it would be discussions about means, not their source narrative through which individuals first agree to treat one another equally. Indeed, the article misses the main point– what could/should be the EU legitimacy pattern in its citizens’ opinion when national narrative still persists, which is necessary to define for the EU political and socioeconomic institutions to work properly. Actually the observed increasing “[o]pposition to European integration” tendency might really be an evidence that such narrative has been absent; if so, do not expect any EU political future perspective as legitimate in individuals eyes. The matter of legitimacy is crucial; otherwise expect a totalitarianism “political culture” tendency too.
A theoretical framework attempting to find out the human legitimacy ultimate pattern see here: http://philpapers.org/rec/KANTCM

“authoritarians are more likely draw sharp distinctions between members of in-groups, with which they identify closely, and out-groups, and they strive to maintain cohesion within their social groups. By contrast, non-authoritarians display a greater concern for maintaining individual autonomy”

Colour me conflicted, batman!

I am clearly a eurosceptic, in believing that the people[s] of Europe have an insufficiently converged social and cultural history to generate a compatible common core of aims and expectations sufficient to legitimise common governance. Yet, by any useful metric of political ideology individual autonomy is my starting point and desired destination, for I am firmly on the negative liberty end of Berlin’s spectrum.

While I recognise that most continental nation-states have not had a long and stable history sufficient to make them unambiguously the logical focus of political accretion, this is not my problem. No, it is only a problem for transnational progressives within Europe who believe Britain must be part of this brave new post-westphalian experiment. Britain has had exactly that long and stable shared social and cultural evolution, which makes it ‘easy’ for governance to be [both] representative [and] accountable, and recognised as legitimate.

This is the problem with root assumptions of this research; starting with the idea that national identity is dangerous and bending political theory to iron out the ‘imperfections’ in this post-westphalian experiment, rather than seeking insight in the natural focuses of political legitimacy, and accepting that the best outcome for each people is what matters, not they share a common outcome.

I share martin’s reservations: Britain does not need ‘fixing’, for all that it might be a very satisfactory outcome for some of our continental neighbours.

Interesting thoughts. I can understand that many anti-EU comments come from those with an authoritarian mindset. However, I note that they often rail against what they perceive to be the creeping authoritarianism of both the EU and their own states.

As for the anger of the taxpayer, it is noteworthy that this seems to trump being a voter in the minds of many. Thankfully, due to VAT, being a taxpayer is a wider enfranchisement than being a voter.

Martin: “Mr Wilburton is pretending the third paragraph in my original comment doesn’t exist. It’s not worth arguing this point anymore. He mischaracterises a lot of other things I say too.”

Feel free to point out where your argument has been misrepresented. To recap, you claim that it’s pointless to make “unverifiable claims about “purposes”” yet feel you’re entitled to make a series of completely unverifiable claims about the purposes of the academic in writing this article, and the site in posting it.

As for your “substantive point”, I’m not sure how we’re supposed to take seriously your argument that the evidence in the journal article is unlikely to support his conclusions when you can’t actually read the article in the first place. If you genuinely want a copy of the article you could e-mail or tweet the author directly (I’d offer to send you the copy myself, but that would be illegal as far as I understand it).

In any case, at no point did I attempt to make the argument that you’ve failed to raise any substantive objections about the article. What I actually said is that “rather than simply criticising the argument” you chose to punctuate your response with a load of baseless nonsense about bias.

On that count there’s certainly no evidence, whatsoever, for the notion (if that is what you’re trying to imply above) that there are “spin doctors” behind the piece, carefully crafting it in such a way as to prevent independent scholars such as yourself from forming a coherent rebuttal. I would suggest that a site which includes articles by the likes of Patrick Minford (about as Eurosceptic as it gets) probably isn’t doing a very good job at Europhile propaganda…

[…] With elections for the European Parliament in May 2014 only having a 3 percent hurdle for parties to overcome and historically lower participation rates, as well as better scores for smaller parties in these secondary-type elections, a continued presence for the AfD at least in the mid-term seems almost assured. This is also because all regional elections in 2014 will take place in the East German Länder where the AfD polled strongly. From a European perspective it will be interesting if the party joins forces with Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen to form a – on the surface paradoxical – pan-european euroskeptic alliance “rooted in a broader authoritarian worldview that also includes higher levels of nationalism a… […]

“Even if the sources were available, I’d question the statistical rigour of what the author is impliedly concluding (to the extent that “rigour” is even relevant when trying to base upon psychology an argument about constitutional law, economics and politics).” Well, the data that Dr. Tillman used, a collection known as the European Values Survey, are readily and freely available to the public. See, for instance, http://www.gesis.org/en/services/data-analysis/survey-data/european-values-study/ and http://www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu/. So if one has methodological concerns about the research in question, the data are available for use in replication purposes.